Tonight’s program features a recorded program that was created for the Galerie Thaddeus Ropac in London, Salzburg, and Paris, which was heard successively from November 28, 2018 to November 16, 2019 to accompany a showing of John Cage’s “Ryoanji” drawings, graphite pencil rock tracing works on handwoven paper that date from the early 1980s and that collectively speak to the artist’s devotion to the famous Ryoanji Temple in Kyoto. The recording we’ll hear is a composite looping of portions of Cage’s various musical works entitled Ryoanji: Solos for Oboe, Flute, Contrabass, Voice, Trombone with Percussion or Orchestral Obbligato (1983-85) which were drawn from 15 different recordings involving performers from all over the world. Cage dedicated each of his five distinct scores to the premiere performers of the works: Joélle Léandre (double bass), Robert Aitkin (flute), James Fulkerson (trombone), Isabelle Ganz (voice), and Michael Pugliese (percussion), all of whom are heard in the present mix. The Galerie Thaddeus Ropac exhibition was simple and beautiful, the Ely House in London perhaps the most perfect place I’d ever visited wherein Cage’s exquisite and peaceful drawings were shown. The exhibition was curated by Julia Peyton-Jones, and the design of the audio portion was overseen by Victoria Miguel. Also noteworthy is the elegant little exhibition booklet, compiled and written in the main by James Pritchett.

"All Things Cage" is a weekly program featuring conversations between Laura Kuhn, Director of the John Cage Trust, and Cage experts and enthusiasts from around the world. If you’d like to propose a guest or a topic for a future program, write directly to Laura at lkuhn@johncage.org. She’d love to hear from you.

The late Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Kenneth Silverman once described his Begin Again: A Biography of John Cage (Knopf, 2012) as the hardest book he’d ever written. This was because, as he put it, pick up any rock and there’s John Cage! Indeed, Cage was not only a world-renowned composer, numbering among his compositions the still notoriously tacet 4’33”, but a ground-breaking poet, a philosopher, a chess master who studied with Marcel Duchamp, a macrobiotic chef, a devotee of Zen Buddhism, a prolific visual artist, and an avid and pioneering mycologist. He was also life partner to the celebrated American choreographer, Merce Cunningham, for nearly half a century, and thus well known in the world of modern dance.

No wonder, then, that nearly everyone who encounters the man or his life’s work has something interesting to say about John Cage!